This place is called in the Greek language the Island of the Blest.
-Herodotus, Book 3, Chapter 26
I may have been bitten by the idea of riding the Darb in 1979 when I first went to the Western Desert, driving south from Assuit in a shared peugeot taxi, a so-called “Flying Coffin”, and descending the plateau in switchbacks through a break in its sheer wall that later I learned was a caravan route up from Kordofan. Kharga Oasis (Outer, that is, as seen from the inner-most desert), what would have been a north-bound caravan’s last stop before reaching the Nile after travelling forty days, came first. So maybe I just wanted to know how that would feel.
